THERE ARE HOLES IN MEN THAT NO ONE ELSE CAN SEE, THAT NOT even love and laurels can fill. In the winter of late 2000, Michael Jordan was restless, and 30 pounds overweight. He had thought he didn’t need the game any longer, which is what most sports idols believe in the beginning. Retirement looks like a never-ending summer vacation to the departed athlete then—golf dates, a little carpooling, a lot of casino action if he wants it, cigars, brandy and no workouts ever again at 7:00 a.m. No psychotic teammates or stormy coaches. No baying reporters. No need to contemplate a 10:00 a.m. shootaround on game day in Detroit after a red-eye flight and three hours of sleep. The quiet days were a balm, a bit of soothing compensation after two decades of being overscheduled and always having to win, and it was very good for him, until one day it wasn’t. Sitting in his Washington office, he found it hard to explain, in the way an estranged mate finds it hard to explain why he needs the exasperating lover back. He just woke up one day and felt the hole. It was the precise moment when he wanted back the thing that, three years before, he had no longer wanted.
The feeling began gripping him sometime around this day in mid-December 2000, a few months before he began publicly flirting with a comeback. He had agreed to an interview with me to discuss his performance as an executive, and spent about half of the time talking instead about what it had meant to be a player, and how much he missed it. “Nothin’ compares to bein’ it,” he said, so wistfully as to signal that he regretted ever having left it, that what he had in its place was not nearly enough. The quiet of his executive life, once his dream, had become a kind of house arrest.
His cell looked like this: about 30’ by 20’, newly furnished and accessorized at MCI Center in Washington, with pale walls and an executive’s power desk. He had a giant military-gray ashtray for his cigars and a Sony flat-screen television and a view of a distant pharmacy. There he sat at mid-afternoon, on a cold Wednesday. “I didn’t want to quit,” he mumbled, shrugging. “I never wanted to quit.”
He looked outside. I looked outside. I found myself sitting in a chair across his desk, where, as a part owner and the president of basketball operations, he lorded over the lowly Washington Wizards—the equivalent, as jobs go, of King of the Leprechauns. The team had a game that night, and again the arena would be about half empty, no matter what the official attendance said. He absently waved a cigar. He ran a hand over his shaven pate. “I miss bein’ it,” he said. He put down the cigar and unconsciously tapped his midsection on which he could feel a roll of fat.
On the outside, it was the same Jordan—the same slightly pigeon-toed walk, the same courteous, if remote, brown-eyed stare, the same slouch of the celebrity who brought himself down into a guest’s Lilliputian world to meet your gaze at eye level. But something wasn’t right. He confessed to frustrations, mostly over what he regarded as the unfairness of a new wave of stars being compared to him, players whose best nights, he observed sardonically, brought them “closer in the public mind to a guy who had those accomplishments tenfold.”
He betrayed the anxiety of a deity who worried about his legend slowly receding. “I don’t want to sound bitter or old or whatever,” he muttered. “I’m just saying that when Michael Jordan is not playing—” He abruptly stopped himself, only then seeing where he wanted to go with this, thinking of the buzz surrounding the Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant. “If a guy—for instance, the other night, Kobe Bryant scores 51 points. Now that is a huge story. And then comparisons start to be made to Michael Jordan. But people tend to forget that Michael Jordan scored 50-plus points three games in a row. You understand my whole point?…People tend to migrate to the [current] player because two years have elapsed from seeing Michael Jordan on the basketball court.”
Having become his own best booster by then, he began chronicling the old accomplishments of this athlete whom he called “Michael Jordan,” speaking of himself at considerable length in the third person. It was jarring, in part because it sounded so strained, and because he had seldom lapsed into such silliness when he was the model of the serene, plainspoken idol. Third-person references were the oratorical swagger stick of the pompously insecure and the cliché-happy, and neither of those archetypes ever had described Michael Jordan. The afternoon served as a reminder about the fragility of being a deity. Jordan shook his head, his mourning palpable.
Start with his misery then—for misery, the mother of men’s reinvention, gave life to his comeback. Three o’clock had arrived, and he looked out a window onto this slate-gray afternoon with freezing winter precipitation in the Washington forecast. His eyes scanned a parking lot and some street beggars. Every few minutes he drifted back to the past. “I read something about Kobe or Vince Carter and it gets the competitor in me going, you know,” he said. “And you hear things that bother you. Somebody has a big game, Vince, Kobe, and people on television talk about them the way they would’ve talked about Michael Jordan. And that gets the competitor in me going because what they don’t understand is Michael Jordan did all these things and—” He paused, checking himself. How far did he want to go with this? “I miss the insanity of being out there. The insanity, the wildness, everything on the line. I’d really love to play those guys. But I—” He fell silent.
The official birth of the comeback would not come for another nine months, but its gestation already had begun amid the frustrations of his days. Golf had proven to be no substitute; management was at best a velvet coffin. Being a Wizards executive had given him few pleasures, except on those days when he could get rid of underperforming players and their high-priced contracts. He’d convinced himself that he had allowed himself, unfairly, to be trapped by circumstance back in Chicago, when he’d retired in early 1999. “I didn’t want to quit,” he said. “I wouldn’t have quit if Phil hadn’t quit.”
He changed the subject, though in a while came back to Jackson. “Does Phil have a game tonight?” he asked. By then, Jackson coached the Los Angeles Lakers, a team that already had won an NBA title under him—number seven as a coach for Jackson, on his way to number eight in a few months. “Does he?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
He pursed his lips, trying to remember. It seemed to matter a great deal, to know where Phil was. “Maybe he does.”
“I know you guys have a game,” I added.
“No,” he mumbled, “I don’t.”
His Wizards would be facing the Philadelphia 76ers and Allen Iverson in about four hours. But he was right: He had no game.
What’s better, being president and an owner or being on the court?
Jordan laughed, looked out the window.
“No way this compares,” he said. “Playin’ it, bein’ it, makin’ the shot,…it’s huge, it’s a whole difference. Nothin’ compares to that. But that’s gone.” For the moment, his position would be that his playing career was gone, irretrievable. “I didn’t want it to be,” he said softly, “but it is.”
At his retirement press conference in 1999, he’d said he was mentally exhausted, but now he had another perception of that time. He said he’d felt just fine.
You could have played another season?
“Easy,” he said.
Two seasons?
“Easy.”
A third?
“Easy. My body would have told me when to stop.”
A third season would have meant that he would be playing at that moment.
Now and then a passing siren bleated from the streets, and his head jerked, involuntarily, toward his window. He had a view of the panhandlers standing near a parking lot as snowflakes fell.
It was not a vista for gods. Over the previous year, he had descended from the firmament and landed hard, taking his place here in the Wizards offices on the arena’s elevated second floor, which was not exactly the second circle of Hell, but, as Dante might have pointed out, you could see it from here. His playing days had left him believing he had the power to do anything; his adulthood was an exercise in absolute dominion. But then he tried to assert his will on the Wizards, which was less a team than a plague. Stars and would-be stars typically rotted in Washington; the young and swift were traditionally traded for the old and withering; malaise generally set in during training camp.
The Wizards were already dead on the vine by that December afternoon, off to the worst start in franchise history, en route to losing 63 of 82 games by season’s end. Jordan could not bear to watch more than a few of the home games in person. He typically took sanctuary in his office just off the Club Concourse level of MCI, where he could glare at his flat-screen television and curse his team while surrounded by discomfited friends. There was a dime-sized splatter on the bottom of the television, where, just a week earlier, he’d fired a beer can at the image of a Wizards player who had infuriated him. “How can you put up that fuckin’ shot?” Jordan demanded of the tiny player on the screen. “What the fuck are you doing?”
The image did not answer him but instead threw a pass intercepted by the opposition and turned into a layup. Jordan howled, bombarding the screen with anything he could find—the remote control, pens, more cans, balls of paper. “What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?”
His friends had tried to sneak out of the room, not wanting to be caught in another of his gales. He wheeled on them, glowering at his old Bulls teammate, longtime buddy and now assistant general manager Rod Higgins, a probing look that Higgins read as, Where the hell do you think you’re going?
Higgins sat down. Jordan glared at him, as if demanding an explanation. “How can anyone take that fuckin’ shot? How…could…anyone…take…THAT…FUCKIN’…SHOT?”
Higgins became a little uncomfortable. “Michael, I didn’t take the shot, okay?”
Jordan knew that he had fooled himself in promising fans a .500 season. No one on the TV screen seemed to understand what he wanted, part of the reason why he had contemplated putting a walkie-talkie right next to Wizards coach Leonard Hamilton, to advise him on plays, substitutions and strategies. “I could say, ‘Think of doing this. Or call a fucking time-out,’” he explained. “But then I thought: I got a coach, I should let him coach. But still it’d be nice to say, ‘Think of calling a fucking time-out.’”
“Fucking” came out of him with agitation. The losing was taking its toll on his moods. Just nine days earlier, he had completely lost it. As he watched from managing owner Abe Pollin’s box, the Wizards lost spectacularly to the Los Angeles Clippers, against whom they had a 19-point lead in the fourth quarter before blowing up like the Hindenburg—slowly enough that you could see the immolation happening, but just fast enough that no one could stop it. In the final minutes, powerless and embarrassed, Jordan felt himself going silently berserk. Heads wheeled from lower seats to look up at him, stares that he read as demanding that he get on the court and fix this. Some people screamed at him to put on a uniform and come back. He stared through them, at which point he noticed TV cameras pointed his way. “I thought, Any second I’m gonna start cursing and all those cameras are gonna show it to everybody,” he said.
He stayed composed, but just barely long enough. Out of the cameras’ sights once the game ended, he stormed into the Wizards locker room and exploded, telling the players they had become a “disgrace to the fans”; that they were afflicted by a “losers’ mentality”; that he wouldn’t hesitate dealing away any of them except that no one in the room had any trade value.
The players looked back blankly at him; he saw no fire. Leonard Hamilton would resign by season’s end, but the end was still a long ways off. “I can see why the fans get [ticked] off and boo,” he said. “I’m angry, too. Some of [the players] don’t push themselves. They take shortcuts.”
He asked that fans and the media reserve judgment about his leadership of the Wizards until he could “make my team.” Making the team meant unmaking it, for starters. Only when he ridded himself of underproducing stars with high-priced contracts could he have adequate money to spend on new players. That meant trying to unload the contracts of the team’s three best-known and most extravagantly paid veterans—forward Juwan Howard, and guards Mitch Richmond and Rod Strickland—whose combined price tags left the Wizards knocking up against the ceiling of the NBA’s salary cap. The Wizards had been a costly disaster, with Jordan’s task akin to rebuilding a mismanaged Eastern European hellhole whose ineptitude and cycles of binge spending had left nothing at his disposal other than some sunny platitudes.
Merely the sight of Howard—who had a seven-year, $105 million contract through the end of the 2002–2003 season—reminded livid fans of the franchise’s history of miscalculations. Playing in his seventh season in Washington, he could score 22 points on one night, then disappear in plain sight and score fewer than 10 in the next game. He worked hard, but nearly whatever he produced offensively, he gave away defensively. The fourth-highest-paid player in the NBA, Howard was neither strong enough at 6′ 9″ and 250 pounds to match up effectively with the league’s most formidable power forwards, nor quick enough usually to play on the perimeter with smaller forwards. His talents left him in limbo between positions—a tweener, as analysts said disparagingly. Fans heaped abuse on him.
But the Howard problem paled against two trades, preceding Jordan’s arrival, which had stripped the Wizards of their best talent.
Three years before, the Wizards dealt away the supremely talented young forward Chris Webber to get Richmond. Webber was 25 at the time and on the cusp of stardom, by then a four-year Wizards veteran for whom the team had given up a roster player and, more critically, three first-round draft choices—essentially sacrificing the club’s future for one player. Then Webber was gone, the Wizards ridding themselves of him, at least in part, because of several off-court legal problems—allegations that he smoked marijuana and was disorderly in a nightclub. In exchange, the Wizards received Richmond, who was 32 and a former All-Star entering his twilight.
Webber had become an All-Star in Sacramento, while Richmond remained a genial man who earned $10 million a year and would be jettisoned at the 2000–2001 season’s end, when the club paid off his contract that ran through the end of the 2001–2002 season. The Wizards had tried unsuccessfully to deal him to other clubs, but no one much wanted a 35-year-old guard with a fat contract any more than a team wanted the 34-year-old Strickland, who would be released with his pair of bad hamstrings at the season’s end, when the Wizards exercised his $5 million buyout clause. Another $10 million guard who came to Washington in 1996 with all-star credentials, Strickland arrived from the Portland Trail Blazers, in exchange for Washington’s young 6′ 11″ power forward Rasheed Wallace. By the time Jordan became team president, Wallace was an All-Star and malcontent in Portland, and Strickland, after two strong seasons in Washington, had settled into being a chronic disappointment. In December of 2000, he was suspended for a game after missing two practices and a team flight to Miami. A month later, he was arrested on a DUI charge.
Few teams in NBA history had ever paid so much for such steady trouble and incompetence. While saddled with one of the NBA’s worst records, the Wizards had the league’s fifth-highest payroll. Just the salaries of Strickland, Richmond and Howard—the last of whom received about $16.9 million in the 2000–2001 season—placed the Wizards over the league’s salary cap, ensuring paralysis for the time being.
The frustration and gallows humor grew within the organization. “Rick Pitino told me I was crazy to take this job,” Leonard Hamilton dared to say one morning in an arena hallway, referring to the then Boston Celtics coach.
Looking for tough players, Jordan dealt away center Cherokee Parks to the Clippers for powerfully built 6′ 6″ forward Tyrone Nesby. The newcomer seemed perfectly cut from the Wizards’ mold, finding himself kicked off the bench for insubordination during a game before the end of his second full month.
But in time, Jordan would get a break. In February of 2001, having known that he would need to unload Howard on an NBA team whose owners had financial pockets deep enough to take a chance on an over-paid potential bust, Jordan found his answer in the Dallas Mavericks and their young, free-spending owner, Mark Cuban. In the best move of his managerial tenure, Jordan got rid of Howard and two Wizards reserves, in exchange for five Mavericks, including the once promising Christian Laettner.
Now, with Howard’s contract no longer hanging around their necks, Jordan could renew his search for promising players. But in Washington, suspicions had arisen that Jordan’s personnel hopes stemmed less from study than impulse. Most days, he sat at home in Highland Park, where he lived about 20 days out of every 30, watching Wizards games alone in his basement like a general in a bunker, and doing his Wizards business via phone.
He did not work 24/7; it was not a phrase in his lexicon. His rhythms at work and play were his own. In Chicago, he sometimes drove his three children to school, telephoned General Manager Wes Unseld and other Wizards colleagues about possible trades, chatted with other teams’ executives, did some Nike business, flew out of town to take in a football game, played some golf, made late-night calls and monitored the rest of his business interests.
By the time he found himself in Washington, on this December afternoon in 2000, he had been gone from Chicago for a full week. The day before, he was…where was he yesterday? He thought about it for a second and it came to him. Florida. He had flown there to complete some business that had nothing to do with basketball, receiving the National Hockey League’s approval for his purchase of a slice of the Washington Capitals—which one of his Wizards partners, Ted Leonsis, agreed to sell him when Jordan became the Wizards’ president of basketball operations.
The previous Saturday, while the Wizards played in Milwaukee, he and his wife, Juanita, discreetly boarded their jet and flew to the Bahamas, where they were guests at the posh opening of a Paradise Island hotel, watching a Whitney Houston concert for a while before going off to gamble—Jordan winning about a half million at the blackjack tables.
Some of those closest to Jordan openly wondered whether he was overextended. A former Bulls assistant coach, Tex Winter, the architect of the Bulls’ famed triangle offense, asked whether his basketball commitment could endure amid all his other interests.
“I don’t question his abilities,” said Winter, by then an assistant under Phil Jackson with the Los Angeles Lakers. “But how many irons does he have in the fire? I do question that. Eventually he’ll lose a lot of inspirational value and credibility if he doesn’t spend more time [in Washington] and devote more time and attention to the players and team.”
Jordan told the skeptics that it didn’t matter where he worked. He had phones and beepers, and could do business anywhere. Lines like that made some NBA executives snicker. “Some [executives] smirk a little when his name comes up,” said one general manager. “They’ll say, ‘This is the real world.’ Let me tell you: There’s no protection on this side of the desk. I hear of him and some of these ex-players going off, traveling places. We work fifty, sixty hours a week all year. I’ll tell you one former player who’s done it right is [Jerry] West [former vice president of the Los Angeles Lakers]. Jerry traveled to places like Transylvania, Kentucky, to scout. He went in an ice storm to see a player. I’ve never admired a player more than Michael. It’s just that we’re not off fishing or whatever it is. And it’s just going to make it harder that he’s not [in Washington] a lot.”
An agent who had dealt with basketball executives for a decade said, “I’m afraid for Michael. He’s going to get his teeth kicked in. He doesn’t bring any of the needed skills—knowing the salary cap in and out, knowing how to negotiate with agents and GMs on that side of the table. And they can’t wait to outsmart him.”
Jordan defenders insisted that Jordan had no real opportunity to improve the team with major trades or acquisitions because Abe Pollin had shackled him, determined to avert a significant rise in player payroll. Pollin freely admitted that he wanted to guard against hefty contracts that would place the club over the salary cap and leave it vulnerable to luxury-tax penalties, which amounted to a one-dollar penalty for every dollar over the cap, or a million-dollar penalty for every excess million. But the owner emphatically denied having blocked any deals, an issue that swiftly became a source of tension between Pollin and his new chief executive. Jordan did not discourage the notion of their differences, saying in his office that he and the team had pulled away from deals after hearing reservations from his “partners”—his appellation, in this case, for Pollin alone. At least publicly, he simultaneously tried putting the best face on what was happening with the owner. “I’m not going to say I’m smart about every decision; I definitely have to understand, you know, the financial situation down the road,” he said casually. “So, based on their observations of long-term things, we backed away from a couple of deals.”
Backed away from a couple of deals: He would not back away from saying it, despite Pollin having denied that he discouraged any trade. It was the first hint of a division between the two men.
Compounding the challenge for Jordan and Pollin was that neither man had ever sought out the other to make their relationship happen. They had enjoyed no professional courtship, all the romancing of Jordan having been done by Ted Leonsis, an Internet kingpin and a short, squatty, ebullient man who admitted being so awed in Jordan’s presence that he actually had paused during a meeting to call his family and let them know that he found himself with the idol. The America Online marketing executive began his wooing of Jordan over dinner in 1999, at a Chicago restaurant, and later presented him the outline of a proposed deal dependent on Pollin’s willingness to grant Jordan control over the basketball operations of the Wizards.
Jordan remained carefully noncommittal. He had many potential NBA suitors at that moment, and seemed to possess leverage in negotiations with everyone. From the beginning, no matter where he went to listen to offers, Jordan wanted, at a minimum, authority over a franchise’s basketball operations and a slice of ownership.
But it would be better, he reasoned at the start of 1999, to own the majority share of a club with a group of investors and have unquestioned control over a team. Ready to join the plutocrats and modern-day Gatsbys in skyboxes, he saw ownership as the last step in his evolution: player to star; star to economic power; powerhouse to owner. Jordan dreamed of forming an ownership group that would purchase a controlling interest in the Charlotte franchise, which had become an embarrassment to the NBA. Early in 1999, the league’s commissioner David Stern arranged for a series of meetings between Jordan and George Shinn, the owner of the Charlotte Hornets, who had been named as a defendant in a sexual assault lawsuit. He would be eventually acquitted, but his franchise reeled from a series of misfortunes. Several of Shinn’s marquee players had fled for more money elsewhere, and the owner was unable to rally support among city leaders for the construction of a new arena. Without a glittering edifice adorned by skyboxes and other NBA amenities, it looked certain that the Hornets would leave Charlotte, in search of a city likely to yield greater box-office revenues. Jordan became viewed as a potential savior who could persuade players to stay, deliver an arena, attract more fans and keep the franchise in Charlotte.
But negotiations broke off when Shinn would not agree to any joint ownership deal ceding complete control of Hornets’ basketball and business decisions to Jordan. The Hornets would leave in 2002 for New Orleans.
In September 1999, Jordan listened briefly to representatives of the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Milwaukee Bucks, but neither group seemed prepared to hand over the control he wanted. Then came his meetings with Leonsis and the mogul’s partners in their holding company, Lincoln Holdings. Only four months earlier, Lincoln had bought the NHL Washington Capitals from Abe Pollin, as well as 44 percent of Pollin’s Washington Sports and Entertainment, which controls the Wizards, MCI Center, the Women’s National Basketball Association Washington Mystics, US Airways Arena and local branches of Ticket-master. When Pollin chose to retire and relinquish ownership, Leonsis would have the contractual right to purchase the remaining interest in the Wizards as well as to buy from Pollin the MCI Center and the Washington Mystics. Leonsis enjoyed the status of a putative successor, giving off the air of a managing partner of the Wizards during his discussions with Jordan.
Any deal struck between the two men, however, would be contingent on Pollin consenting to transfer authority over basketball operations from his general manager, Wes Unseld, to Jordan. By January 2000, Leonsis and Jordan reached agreement on the basic outline of a financial agreement: Leonsis’s Lincoln Holdings group would give a roughly 10 percent stake in the Wizards to Jordan, as well as a minority stake in the Washington Capitals. Later, reports would spread from unidentified sources that Jordan had received $30 million to $50 million of Lincoln equity without paying a dime. Leonsis would coolly deny it, declining to answer whether Jordan would receive the equity simply for work he did for Lincoln and the Wizards—a pretext that would have been tantamount to free equity.
Through early 2000, Leonsis presided over the deal-making that most mattered. Leonsis, not Pollin, served as the charmer, the one who, aware that Jordan had invested in CBS SportsLine and formed a soon-to-
be-foundering Internet venture with John Elway and Wayne Gretzky called MVP.com, whetted Jordan’s appetite for the Internet’s future by talking of his AOL experiences and sketching possible ways for Jordan to plunge into entrepreneurial opportunities in the sector.
All along, Pollin remained a third wheel, never an engaging intimate with whom to share stories over drinks, simply a possible impediment to the deal were he not to give Jordan enough authority, or at least the appearance of authority.
By then both the Wizards’ and Pollin’s reputations had hit bottom. The team had not sold out a game all season, its season ticket sales having dropped over the last year, according to reports, by almost 25 percent, down to about 6,400 seats. Its losing head coach, Gar Heard, was under siege. For frothing Washington fans and the media, the news that a wooed Michael Jordan might be seriously contemplating a move to their city represented Pollin’s last chance to prove his commitment to winning.
The elderly owner and the idol dined together at Pollin’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, and over the days ahead, reached agreement on a broad definition of Jordan’s powers as the club’s chief basketball official. Jordan agreed to Pollin’s insistence that Wes Unseld remain as general manager, and that the other longtime Pollin favorite, Susan O’Malley, carry on as president of Washington Sports and Entertainment, with responsibilities over the marketing and business end of the franchise. That hazy division of executive responsibilities between Jordan and O’Malley invited the probability that, on occasion, O’Malley would tread on matters that Jordan believed to be his turf. This seeming likelihood was never a hurdle during negotiations, which concluded with Jordan signing a five-year contract to serve as president of basketball operations, though not before Jordan attorney Curtis Polk, late during the negotiations, irked Pollin by extracting his concession to a clause obligating Jordan to attend no more than six Wizards games each season. In the end, Jordan had everything he wanted, including an assurance from Pollin that he would have control over the Wizards’ basketball operations.
But there existed a murky line in the Wizards’ executive offices between “control” of basketball operations and absolute control over everything involved with basketball-related spending. In late 2000, with both Pollin and Jordan perturbed over the issue of power, the media-leery owner agreed to a private interview in his office. He did not seek to hide his irritations with the reports, leaked by the Jordan camp, that he had barred several trades and become an insurmountable obstacle to Jordan’s capacity to deal with other teams.
“Incorrect,” Pollin said. He shook his head disgustedly.
He laid out their business relationship: Jordan had a written agreement, signed by Pollin, that gave him “control over basketball.” That kind of language seemed clear, except it wasn’t so clear, indicated the owner. Pollin believed the phrase to mean control over personnel decisions, but that it stopped well short of ultimate authority over expenditures. “We also have a handshake,” Pollin added, his way of saying their agreement went deeper than mere words on a document. Pollin maintained—never to be publicly disputed by Jordan—that both of them had orally agreed “that no deal would take place unless I agreed with it.” Pollin called it his “moral right.”
Pollin waved his hand back and forth through the air, the way you would erase a blackboard, as if to say that this whole discussion was beside the point anyway. He insisted that Jordan had come to him with only one proposed deal—the trade for Tyrone Nesby—and that he had given it his blessing, despite realizing that Nesby’s contract meant the team’s payroll would rise by another $3 million the following season.
The claims of the Jordan camp increasingly angered him. He momentarily lost his cool. “I don’t care what they said,” he snapped. “The only deal they came to me with was [the Nesby trade], and I approved it.”
He had particularly grown weary of the suggestion that the star and his underlings felt so discouraged that they had stopped approaching him with possible trade scenarios. “‘Scenarios’ is just a bunch of bull. Nesby was the trade. All the others were talk.”
He was waving those arms again, trying to wipe the nastiness away. He searched for a pleasant topic, trumpeting Jordan’s benefit to ticket sales and marketing, acknowledging that about 500 more season tickets, and 2,000 10-game packages, had been sold since Jordan’s arrival. “Susan O’Malley is not bashful as far as asking him to do things, and Michael has really been terrific for her. He’s done an awful lot. Marketing was not supposed to be part of the deal. The deal was to run the basketball team. Marketing is Susan’s deal. But he has been terrific for marketing and Susan, so I’m very grateful.”
But things were not terrific there either. Back in his office, Jordan had begun resisting and resenting his place in the club’s marketing strategy, and in Susan O’Malley’s plans in particular. He did not want to be obligated to market a poor team, he told people. He could have stayed in Chicago and just as well have let the Bulls market his face, if marketing was what he wanted to do.
Besides, he thought, he had done his fair share of marketing already, having consented to the use of his name and image in such Wizards ticket promotion themes as “Jordan Is Back.” No one should expect more, he thought. “I’ve tried to give them a jump-start, you know: ‘Jordan’s back’; having my input, blah-blah-blah. I even told them it would be a limited situation, so that I don’t feel like I’m gonna have to try to sell a product that’s not selling itself.”
Now Jordan was letting loose. His voice rose. His words came in a rush, making clear that O’Malley and her marketing strategies had lost their appeal for him. “If I go out there and do all that [promotion and marketing] and my team comes back and they’re four-and-twenty, what do you think people are gonna say? They’re gonna say, The product is not selling itself. It’s not. The [Wizards] are not seventeen-and-four. They’re four-and-seventeen. So what are you trying to say about, Come out and watch the Wizards. Come out and watch the Wizards what? Lose? If we were seventeen-and-four, then I would feel an obligation and more comfortable going out and saying, Hey, look, we’ve turned this thing around, they’re working hard every day, blah-blah-blah. That, that to me.”—now his voice rose another level still, loud, adamant, a touch angry—“shows a plan to me that shows how my attitude and personality have impacted the whole process. Until [that happens], I cannot even think about going outside to talk [market and promote].”
In Chicago, he never had been a traditional employee. He never had had a genuine boss before, someone like Pollin who would signal through O’Malley his expectations and hopes for a little extra work now and then. When you hired Michael Jordan, you contracted to get Michael Jordan’s services, as Jordan defined them.
O’Malley got on his nerves. A blond, single fortysomething who by her own admission had little serious time for anyone or anything not related to business, she never exhibited the slightest awe around Jordan, this alone making her unlike Ted Leonsis and 99 percent of the business strangers whom Jordan met for the first time. She did not hesitate approaching Jordan and telling him that she would appreciate it if he were to perform some small marketing chore on behalf of the team, having a way of standing quite close to him, like a pint-sized politician aggressively buttonholing a somewhat reluctant colleague, a powerful woman who did not hesitate to wield power or remind others she had it. She did not take no easily or sometimes coolly, renowned for her persistence, which made her a success in Pollin’s circle but left her often regarded as a pain in the ass in the largely male world she inhabited.
Doubtless, sexism had something to do with it, and so, too, did the stories that made their way around MCI about how she believed in a tough accountability when people did not deliver what she wanted. The latest tale was of a Wizards player complaining that he had lost an opportunity to put his family in a luxury box one evening because O’Malley had withdrawn the privilege after he failed to appear for a community event. Whether true or not, the tale had the effect of leaving people to worry more about O’Malley, which might have been the intent. Neither she nor Pollin backed down from people, which made them very much like Jordan, and therefore, given their irreconcilable agendas, virtually guaranteed their mutual antagonism.
And Jordan had problems beyond O’Malley. As the players, coaches and management were targeted for mockery in light of the Wizards’ awfulness, there was no immunity even for the new club president, by then increasingly criticized in the local press for being inattentive and inaccessible. In a style of management that a recluse would have loved, Jordan traveled undercover in Washington, sometimes watching games alone in his office without the public even knowing he had sneaked into town, then flying out of the city just as stealthily. He had become something spectral, less man than apparition. Jordan liked the remove. He aspired to the privileges of other wealthy American barons—to watch games from a gilded room, undisturbed, never revealing himself unless he saw an advantage in it. “It’s nice to watch comfortable in an office,” he said. “People aren’t staring and calling for you to go out there and play. I like to be relaxed up here. It’s more comfortable.”
A couple of Jordan intimates said privately that the critics failed to understand a fundamental Jordan concern: that he wouldn’t permit himself to be exploited as he suspected other retired black athletes had been. He wouldn’t be the Wizards’ “show pony,” he declared. The losing team, he declared, “doesn’t represent anything I’m about—winning, success, work ethic.”
Meanwhile, he exercised the powers of a typical NBA basketball executive. Soon after his arrival in Washington, he had fired the coach, Gar Heard, and in time found Leonard Hamilton at the University of Miami, hired him and would soon be saying good-bye to him, too. He could act decisively but, just the same, his powers and influence were limited. Despite the “president” in his title, he enjoyed less sway than ever. Worse, his team was awful, and showed no signs of improving anytime soon. Old rivals rubbed it in.
In a home game against Indiana, the Pacers’ voluble star Reggie Miller, a favorite target of hecklers, started jawing with a few courtside fans while having his way with the Wizards guards, particularly Mitch Richmond. Markedly slowing after 14 years of playing 40 minutes a night, Richmond moved on his hurting knee like an old ram stepping gingerly on a steep slope.
Jabbering to the hecklers while abusing Richmond, Miller missed a three-point shot and fell back, landing on the lap of a heckler’s wife. He delivered a message for the couple and everyone around them: “Tell Michael Jordan that he better make some changes. He better do something.” Miller gestured at Richmond. “He can’t guard me. He’s too old.”
No amount of resolve could make up for age and a bad team’s dearth of talent, thought Jack Ramsay, the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers’ 1977 championship team. He had discussed the shortcomings of the Wizards with Jordan, who, half smiling, shook his head. “I got the impression that he’d thought he was going to step in and get a quick fix with these guys and didn’t,” recalls Ramsay. “In the old days, he could make even a journeyman good. That was over, and I think it surprised him.”
As Ramsay recalled it, he said to Jordan, “This is a harder job than you imagined, isn’t it?”
“It sure is,” Jordan replied, that head still shaking.
In his office, I said to him that there was something incongruous about his presence there; that his job in Washington sometimes seemed so surreal as to be an act against nature—Michael Jordan signing a contract to run the Washington Wizards; Michael Jordan owning a share of the Wizards rather than the Chicago Bulls. “You being with the Wizards—it’s like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle owning the Minnesota Twins,” I blurted.
He fingered his cream tie and, adolescent-like, pressed it against his mouth, holding it there like a mischievous schoolkid muffling a laugh.
“Well, you’re right,” he said.
He managed to raise the subject of Chicago every few minutes. When stuck on the road for any appreciable time, he talked wistfully of Chicago. “I’m in the business world now,” he said philosophically, “but I wish all my business connections were in Chicago, because that’s where my home and roots are. But”—he reminded himself of the upside to his presence here—“this is a good deal for me here.”
He stared back at his muted TV.
He shared a longing: He wished the owners of the Chicago Bulls had asked him a year or two earlier to be a partner and run their team, “so that I could have at least thought about their offer.”
He had not so much chosen Washington as landed in it, after the Bulls declined to offer him a piece of ownership and power. Since then, a portion of the Chicago media, which gleefully excoriated Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and chief basketball executive Jerry Krause for letting Jordan get away, had encouraged the impression of a god exiled. The city’s Jordan detractors regarded the idol as a traitor for taking his talents elsewhere. It was not nearly that bad in either case. It was not that bad because all things and all men pass, and even owners die or sell out, and surely the day would come when Jerry Reinsdorf would be old and Michael Jordan would not.
That suggested a question: If in 5, 6, 8, 10 years from now, Jerry Reinsdorf and his partners wanted to sell the Bulls, would he rule out trying to buy the team?
The office became very quiet, and Jordan’s eyes blinked, blinked, blinked, did not move off that window. The question, catching him by surprise, was freighted with potential pitfalls, and it seemed reasonable, as his silence lengthened, that he might decline to answer it altogether. “No, I don’t want to rule it out,” he said softly.
And if he were nearly anybody else in the world, he would carefully have left it there and said not another word. But he was a man at ease talking about possibilities, having invented himself out of fantasies. He saw them not as delusions but as prelude—visions to be realized, destiny at the end of the lane he was bursting through.
He sat in this Washington office and looked through that distant pharmacy and said again, “I really wish all my business interests were here,” and meant Chicago in that moment, as if he’d never left it. Its pull on him was irresistible, and no one could logically blame him for that any more than one could rail at the lover who dreamt of going back. “I don’t want to rule it out,” he repeated.
Could it be the most natural thing in the world?
“It is, it is, it is,” he said brightly, fiddling with his tie.
Happy now, he was also careful, noting that he had given his loyalty to Leonsis and Pollin; that only when he had “turned this situation around in the right direction” would he ever consider leaving for the Bulls.
And he could have stopped himself there, too, but by now he had a vision of it—the Bulls’ phone calls, some tentative offer he’d made to buy the team, the prospect of a deal, the spurned king returning.
“If that situation is put on the table,” he said slowly, “I would sit down with Ted, all my guys…and Abe, if he’s still part of the situation, and say, ‘Look, the Chicago team wants to sell. It’s a great fit for me, it’s my home. Washington has turned itself around and is headed in the right direction, what do you think?’ And I would totally honor their input before making a decision.”
He shrugged, smiling sheepishly. He looked a little relieved. There. It was out. He looked like any man who had purged himself of a fantasy.
Tired of his cigar, he waved it like a bored professor with a pointer, then dropped it in the ashtray a last time. He had a box of the Cubans in his office, and an SUV, and a driver waiting if he wanted him, and $400 million in banks and property. But no game. “It’s real hard not havin’ it,” he said. “But that’s gone.”
He had tried sating his competitive appetites on golf courses and in Caribbean casinos. A man with much time on his hands, he had no idea how to fill it. The scarcity of his passions raised questions as to what he was about. What did he stand for, exactly? That he seemed not to be evolving concerned some old associates, however. A former producer of his Nike ads, a Portland public relations executive named Jim Riswold, softly warned that if he wanted his appeal to endure in retirement, Jordan now needed to stand for something beyond games, to find a cause or passion, something.
Riswold, whose commercials had helped to make the young Jordan a star on the order of Hollywood’s leading men, believed that the idol was already being supplanted as the top endorsement star by Tiger Woods. “Tiger’s more influential because he’s opened a game,” said Riswold. “I’d like Michael to talk about issues larger than sports now—maybe something like the role and responsibility of the athlete in an era where we’re preoccupied with the glorification of the athlete. If a retired athlete has a cause outside the arena, people listen. If not, they don’t.”
Years earlier, when Nike faced condemnation for its low-wage sweat-shops overseas, Jordan had stayed mute. When Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt asked for his support in a North Carolina senate race against the rabidly conservative Jesse Helms, Jordan quietly declined, worried about how his involvement might affect sales of his shoes, famously confiding to friends, “Republicans buy shoes. too.” His involvement in the city of Washington, overwhelmingly black and deeply impoverished in parts, had been minimal. He had carefully made himself a blank slate in all matters outside basketball.
Once he thrived precisely because of this congenial indifference to all things political and controversial. Having disarmed issues of race long before by never acknowledging them, he’d become White America’s favorite TV commercial pitchman back in the ’80s, an epoch tailor-made for Michael Jordan. He was, as much as anything, an invention of those times, his early years in the NBA neatly coinciding with burgeoning American businesses and appetites—the explosive growth in media and shoe companies; the country’s addictive fascination with celebrities; the global ascendancy of the NBA; and, most important, the elevation of glamour to an exalted social attribute.
It was a great time to be Michael Jordan, marketed as the embodiment of Beauty and Grace, on his way to becoming worth more than $100 million in his first decade in the league. Sports in America always had practiced a kind of monotheism, and he was the god of his times. As with any deity, America quickly forgave him his idiosyncrasies and excesses, most notably his gambling forays on golf courses with shady men who lifted large sums from him. The media pounced, then retreated. Scrutiny of him eased, the press according him a deference that seemed born of the see-nothing-know-nothing ’50s. By his second retirement, he ranked among the most recognizable people on the planet and, unquestionably, its most famous athlete. “I’ve always appreciated the respect,” he said in his office. “I know there’re a lot of people out there who remember.”
But the world had moved on. Kobe Bryant had become the sport’s newest darling, and Vince Carter the prince of air, and Michael Jordan a basketball executive who, with time for gambling weekends in the Bahamas, had largely fallen off the front pages and sports sections, taking his place on the celebrity gossip pages—the press noting his travels in small items, another aging star whose luminescence dimmed in his inert state. As Riswold predicted, the supreme young golfer Tiger Woods had eclipsed Jordan in popularity to become Madison Avenue’s most popular commercial spokesman, taking in $20 million more from endorsements than the former king at his peak, with Jordan’s shoe line now featuring younger athletes pushing his gear. Jordan thought it silly that so many fans and writers heralded any young athlete whose significant accomplishments spanned no longer than a couple of years: Didn’t they have any idea how long he had dominated? he asked.
In this cold winter of 2000, looking out the window from behind his immense desk, he felt cuffed. “I didn’t want to quit,” he said. “I get itches to play. Then you see the fans talking about these other players and comparing them to you…” Comparing them to Michael Jordan. It was too much for him. He stopped himself, bit down on his lip.
This is not the way it was supposed to be. At some point, three years of solitude had become too much. He had turned on a television, heard the cheers for new gods and despaired that a game had moved on without him.
“I never wanted to quit,” he said. “Never…. It’s natural to feel that. It’s the itches you get.”
Do you ever get a case of the itches so bad that you want to come back?
“In terms of playing? No.” He couldn’t admit it yet.
Not even sometimes?
“It’s a what-if, a what-if. I have a lot of what-ifs. But these are things that you have to deal with…. You know that your time has come and gone. No one said you weren’t going to have to deal with some things.”
It did not sound like he was dealing with it particularly well.
If so, he wouldn’t be the first. Great athletes, the gods especially, get restless. Their addiction to the game kicks in, and sometimes life offers no adequate substitutes. Muhammad Ali—who had resolved never to leave beaten and battered, who seemed to have succeeded when he retired after beating Leon Spinks in a rematch at age 36 and winning the heavyweight title for an unprecedented third time—came back at 38 to be pounded by Larry Holmes. One of Jordan’s golfing buddies and a fellow sports-team owner, hockey legend Mario Lemieux, had fled retirement to play again for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The itches, as Jordan knew, could get anybody. Why should anyone have been surprised? Nobody took the brushes away from Michelangelo at 37. No one would have cheered the retirement of Hemingway at 38. Why should anyone expect, let alone demand, that athletes not feel entitled to experience the same slow decline as the rest of us?
As 2001 began, many people resisted the idea of a Jordan comeback for the same reason they didn’t want anyone putting another paint stroke on the Mona Lisa: You don’t mess with perfection. They cringed at the thought of Jordan defiling the exquisiteness of his 1998 ending. The seeming final shot of his career, an 18-foot jumper over the Utah Jazz’s fallen guard, Bryon Russell, had given him and the Bulls their sixth NBA championship. Only a few other professional athletes—Bill Russell, Gene Tunney and Rocky Marciano came to mind—had ever retired as champions, and no other famous American athlete ever had matched Jordan for prevailing at his end under more pressure. Why mar that? the critics asked.
But why did their perfect ending need to be his? Cal Ripken, in his own twilight at that moment, had given thought to Jordan’s dilemma. And Jordan had read what Ripken, then still active as a player, said: “I can’t understand how Michael Jordan could give up playing when he did—not with all he could still do, can still do, you know? I’m not passing judgment on Michael…. I’m just saying I could never do what Michael did. I just love playing too much.”
Like Ripken, Jordan had come in with Reagan. He was one of those athletes whose career reminded you, against your will, of your own passages, and mortality, of the days fleeing. It could make you a little queasy. But it also explained why many people like Ripken greeted the thought of a Jordan comeback with intense interest. A comeback stops time; even turns back the clock. Ripken would not have minded the clock stopping. Many interested parties came to feel this way in time, including a melancholy Michael Jordan. He had a choice: He could reclaim the basketball court, or he could sit in this office, looking forward to watching his flat-screen and dealing with Susan O’Malley and Abe Pollin.
Even gods get the itches. A month later, he began working out. In another month, word spread that Michael Jordan was contemplating a comeback.
Before returning to the court, Jordan had two key managerial tasks to carry out. With Leonard Hamilton resigning at the end of the Wizards’ 19–63 season, Jordan now needed to hire a talented coach, and use the Wizards’ first pick in the NBA draft to land a potential superstar around whom to build the team for many years. It was a combination of duties that, if successfully completed, would likely make the Wizards a fixture in the playoffs in the near future. The most winning coach, and his personal favorite, was beyond his reach: Phil Jackson had a lengthy contract in Los Angeles. Jordan made a call to his former Chicago Bulls teammate John Paxson. For the moment, Paxson was part of a broadcasting team covering Bulls games, but most observers in Chicago believed that the Bulls were grooming him to help run the franchise someday. Jordan wanted him.
Jordan always had loved Paxson’s savvy and reliability during their playing days. The mere mention of Paxson prompted Jordan to recall the smaller, slower man’s finest moment, a long, open jumper—off a pass from Jordan, of course—which had clinched the Bulls’ third championship against Phoenix. On and off the court, Paxson had thrived in the basketball profession because he subjugated his interests to the organization’s and its stars. Jordan knew he could work with him. Just as importantly, the selection of Paxson would mean that Jordan wouldn’t need to turn to a stranger to coach him if he came back and played, an increasingly likely prospect.
On the phone, Jordan said hi and quickly offered him the head coaching position.
Paxson said he was flattered. But he added he couldn’t take the job. Private family matters made it impossible for him to leave Chicago. He thanked Jordan, wished him well, and the two old friends promised to keep in touch.
It marked the third time in a year that a potential Wizards coach had gently rebuffed him. Before hiring Leonard Hamilton, Jordan tried to land Mike Jarvis, the longtime coach of St. John’s University, who said no after salary negotiations broke down. He called the University of Kansas coach Roy Williams, who had soared in stature since his days when he joked with Jordan and beat him at pool as a young assistant under Dean Smith. The two men casually talked about Jordan’s daunting task in Washington. Williams said sympathetically, Looks like you have a really big challenge there.
So does that mean you’re not going to be my coach? Jordan asked lightly.
His words sounded, said someone who knew of the conversation, like they were meant to feel out his listener, inviting Williams to take the subject of coaching the Wizards seriously or treat Jordan’s line like a joke. A surprised Williams laughed, but he did not bite. He said he liked things at Kansas.
Only then had Jordan hired Leonard Hamilton, passing over one of his failed Bulls coaches, Doug Collins, a former NBA All-Star player whose two head-coaching stints had ended in disappointment. Now a year later, Jordan took another look at Collins, who had been fired after three seasons in Chicago, and dismissed midway into his third season in Detroit. Collins’s pattern and that of his teams had been similar in the two cities: swift improvement, talk that his tutelage had improved the play of a key youngster or two, heady playoff appearances, early playoff exits, a stalling of progress, and then signs of trouble between the coach and his players.
Trouble with a coach can be concealed in the NBA only so long as a team keeps climbing and the coach enjoys, in turn, the leverage coming to any Svengali. When the climb stops, the players’ grievances flow like lava. It did not help Collins, in Chicago or Detroit, that he had irked key club officials. As setbacks mounted on the court, word spread that his players were alienated by Collins’s emotional swings and criticisms, leaving management in both cities to conclude that he had lost the capacity to lead the teams any higher. In 1989, Chicago owner Jerry Reinsdorf dismissed him by saying that he didn’t believe Collins could “take the team from point B to C,” after which Jordan privately told an old friend that he never again would play for a coach so emotional.
As badly as Collins’s Chicago days ended, his Detroit episode was worse. After waiting six years for another coaching chance, Collins inherited an underperforming team and transformed it by his second season, the Pistons winning 54 of 82 regular season games in a league where 50 victories marked a team as strong, sometimes superb. The victories triggered Collins’s oversized emotions. He talked of loving players. He hugged players. He got dewy-eyed. He beat Chicago and Jordan in a nationally televised game, after which he began crying on the court, emotionally spent, as if he had just won the biggest game of his life.
A Detroit official came over to congratulate him, hoping to find words that would encourage Collins to put this single game in proper perspective: “Doug, enjoy it. It’s a moment.” An expressionless Jordan glanced at Collins, then walked toward the Pistons’ bench and found John Bach, formerly an assistant coach in Chicago and now back with Collins in Detroit. “Tell Douggie, ‘Good game,’” Jordan said to Bach. “But tell him that next time, I’m really gonna give him something to cry about.”
The Pistons became one of the NBA’s best stories. With Collins presiding from the bench, and Grant Hill, Joe Dumars and Allan Houston starring on court, the club looked to be on the verge of entering the NBA’s top echelon of contenders. But a fragile alliance existed between the coach and his squad. His demands and style wore on them. He sometimes shamed players in front of their teammates. At a team meeting during a tough stretch, a player cried out in hopes of inspiring his teammates, “We gotta play defense,” to which Collins asked, “Does that include you?”
The peace could last only as long as they soared. Then, as swiftly as the Pistons had become contenders, they collapsed. By mid-season in 1997–1998, even the goal of making the playoffs, once a virtual certainty, looked unlikely. The team lost more than it won by then, and Pistons officials had begun worrying about Collins. He looked gaunt. It was the result, they thought, of stress, inadequate sleep, too many Diet Cokes and all his hours spent on a stationary bike.
Strung so tightly, he left those around him guessing about which Collins they would find from day to day. A Pistons staff member often arrived early on mornings to see Collins already there, peddling furiously on his bike, trying to work off his frustrations from the latest loss, confessing to barely having slept, worrying aloud about the players’ feelings. Key Pistons had turned on him. One moment during a game seemed to say everything about his problems. An uncontested Joe Dumars had begun slowly dribbling the ball up the court and toward the mid-court line, looking to set up a play, when Collins shouted at him, “Joe, get it over the line.” Dumars looked back at Collins, remembered a former Pistons official at courtside, “like he was nuts.”
The coach had lost Dumars’s loyalty by then, and Grant Hill’s, too—a painful development on several levels for the coach, not least because Collins yearned for players to be close to him. In his worst moments, he was a walking grudge, suffused with self-pity. He heard reports of Jordan expressing “love” for Phil Jackson, and said longingly that he wished his players felt that way about him. The coach needed love too much, thought the former Pistons official.
That need conflicted with his autocratic style. He did not show much interest in input from players or even some of his assistant coaches, leading to conflicts in particular with proud stars who had ideas of their own. His basketball knowledge, everyone around him agreed, was prodigious. No coach in the league appeared more skilled during a time-out at diagramming plays that led to great shots for his stars. “If we could have called a time-out every minute, we might have won every game,” recalled the former official.
But that same colleague urged him to permit his angry players a measure of individuality on the court. Having watched him halt practices to lecture individual players about a single mistake, he suggested to Collins that perhaps he needed to back off once in a while. Sometimes less was more, he said gently, adding that the best coaches seemed to say something quickly and then step away. An ear toward his players’ concerns might help, too, suggested the official, who then spoke directly: “Doug, you can’t be dictatorial or stubborn.”
Collins replied that he didn’t want to hear it.
Then came more losses, to be followed by more of Collins’s emotional storms. The official saw so much pain in Collins’s expression that he began to fear the coach’s misery might take down the entire team. Others within the organization shared his view. Not much later, only 45 games into his third season, the Pistons fired Collins.
He went into coach’s exile, doing basketball commentary again for a television network. But no NBA team beat down a door over the next few seasons to woo him, and it seemed, just as likely as not, that his days as a professional head coach had passed.
Then Jordan called him. Remembering their Bulls days together, Jordan decided to opt for a known commodity he could command over a wild card who might exert an unwanted authority. He had controlled Collins during most of their time together in Chicago, enjoying the power to pressure Collins into doing whatever he wanted done on a court. Jordan told anyone who asked now that he thought Collins’s past coaching stints had revealed his ability to motivate and improve young players. Jordan had made up his mind: Collins was his guy. Jordan offered him the job and a four-year, $20 million deal without consulting Abe Pollin.
It was done. Not having worked in the NBA for three years, Collins now owed his basketball life to Jordan.
His gratitude and their history together made Collins both an ideal and dangerous choice to look after Jordan’s comeback—ideal, in that a confident Jordan believed he could work with Collins, and dangerous, in that a confident Jordan believed he could steer Collins. Jordan immediately became the shadow boss, free to make the decisions that mattered most, at a cost in time to his own body and the respect of his teammates for their volatile coach.
With Collins chosen, Jordan now only had one major decision left. As the NBA draft approached, his big board bore more names than ever of coveted college and high school players. But he hadn’t seen many of the players in person. He had a far less intimate and detailed understanding of players’ strengths and weaknesses than many of his managerial counterparts in the NBA. Spain’s Pau Gasol, to be drafted by Memphis and quickly become a frontline player in the league, received no serious consideration from the Wizards. Other notables fell off the Wizards’ screen. For Jordan and the Wizards, the best player for the moment appeared to be a 6′ 11″ high school center and power forward, out of Glynn Academy in Georgia, named Kwame Brown, who, at 19, had been named to all of the high school all-American teams that mattered. He had glittering statistics—averaging 20 points, 13 rebounds and about six blocks a game in his senior year. Having collected 17 points and seven rebounds against other major high school talent in the McDonald’s All American Game, he looked to the Wizards brass like the prize of the draft, someone with the potential to be groomed over a few years into becoming the next NBA phenom, a Jermaine O’Neal or Kevin Garnett.
A second player who caught their eye was another big high school man-child, Tyson Chandler. Jordan approved a suggestion that the Wizards bring both prospects into Washington, to be privately worked out together. They would perform the same drills and, finally, play a one-on-one game against each other. Jordan and the rest of the brass figured the workout would give them the best chance to study the players’ skills and competitive fire in a pressure setting.
Brown wowed them in Washington. A smiling Chandler had amiably stuck out his hand for a shake before the one-on-one game, but a grim Brown responded by doing nothing more than grabbing the rival’s hand and letting go, ready not to make a friend but to go to war. He destroyed Chandler in front of the private audience of Wizards officials. “Maybe that one workout impressed Michael and the rest of us too much,” one of the officials said later.
With his dominant workout, Brown solidified his hold on the Wizards’ imaginations. On the eve of the draft, Jordan and the other Wizards officials contemplated whether to try dealing their number one pick for All-Star forward Shareef Abdur-Rahim, who would soon end up in Atlanta. The imagined deal carried the Wizards’ vision of making the team into an immediate playoff contender. But, in the end, the Wizards brass believed the cost of the deal to be too high and that, more important, Brown possessed the potential, as Jordan privately put it, to develop into one of the league’s true stars. Maybe he wouldn’t be a star immediately, Jordan cautioned. But the kid can contribute something this season.
Another official told Jordan that the Los Angeles Clippers might be interested in dealing young talented forward Elton Brand. Jordan didn’t care. He wanted Brown, he said. The issue was closed.
That week, Kwame Brown became the first high school player ever selected with the first overall pick in the NBA draft. Jordan viewed it, along with his unloading of Juwan Howard, as a high point of his executive tenure.
In early 2001, as winter’s sleet moved toward his spring’s hopes, Jordan spent fewer days than ever in Washington, having made his great escape. He worked out seriously in Chicago, the comeback unacknowledged but in full flight, with Jordan and his personal trainer Tim Grover arranging for private games at Grover’s gymnasium, Hoops the Gym, where Jordan first tested his skills against a contingent of mostly former college players now working in the Chicago area. Almost immediately, he exhibited the stiffness and pains of an overweight man who had not exerted himself in three years. The famous knees swelled during the first days of the private games in March. One of the scrimmages’ participants, a former Harvard basketball captain, Arne Duncan, by then the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools System, saw ice bags around both Jordan knees at the end of contests, which Duncan and other players simply viewed as a consequence of normal basketball stresses.
The bags became fixtures. Grover was not yet worried, buoyed by Jordan’s conditioning workouts before the private games, watching most of his excess pounds melt off, confident that Jordan was on schedule to play in NBA games by the opening of the Wizards’ preseason, still more than a half year away. His game seemed largely intact, even when hindered in these early stages by a lack of leg power that limited his lift on jump shots. One afternoon, a Chicago business executive named John Rogers, a former Princeton basketball captain, enjoyed the thrilling sensation of leaping with the legend and getting his hand on Jordan’s shot. “I was thinking to myself,” Rogers later recalled, “I’m about to stuff Michael Jordan.” Only then, with Rogers’s hand on the ball, Jordan’s strong arms continued rising and managed somehow to get off the jumper, which went in.
As much as he enjoyed scoring against Ivy League foils, Jordan knew he could not gauge what he had left without pitting himself against a tougher class of opposition. So, as the NBA regular season and later the league’s playoffs concluded, he brought in new waves of players, a mix of friends, old protégés and former rivals who wanted this test as much as Jordan. Fresh from the Boston Celtics, his longtime friend Antoine Walker arrived, soon to be joined by Phoenix’s Penny Hardaway, once thought to be among many possible Jordan successors when he starred at Orlando and outplayed Jordan in a playoff series that followed Jordan’s return from his baseball sabbatical. Charles Barkley, retired and a good 50 pounds overweight, dropped in. So did a Jordan protégé, the Dallas Mavericks’ talented Michael Finley, and an old Jordan rival and fellow North Carolina alum, Jerry Stackhouse, fresh from the playoffs with Detroit. Jordan’s former on-court bodyguard with the Bulls and off-court running buddy, Charles Oakley, showed up, as well as some current Bulls, including big forward Marcus Fizer. Another retired former teammate, Bill Wennington, played a game. Tyson Chandler, not so far off his thumping from Kwame Brown and headed to the Bulls’ training camp, said he wanted in, as did a young, talented Wizards hopeful, shooting guard Courtney Alexander.
Then there was a young 6′ 7″ boulder named Ron Artest, a swift Bulls shooting guard with the determination and ferocity of a middle linebacker. Jordan loved his intensity, wished he had 12 Wizards with Artest’s fight. With the arrival of Artest and the other NBA regulars, hard training began in earnest. Some days, particularly when he had the touch on his jump shots—the fadeaways especially—he dominated his millionaire practice opponents. On other afternoons, they schooled him, beating him downcourt, dunking over him, once in a while stealing his dribble. Wennington told a reporter that Jordan didn’t seem to move as well. Charles Barkley eventually weighed in against his playing again, and, from 2,000 miles away, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sounded no less pessimistic.
But, on balance, Jordan expressed satisfaction. He could feel it coming back, he told Grover, who had paced his workouts prudently, building strength without overtaxing him. Aside from an occasional back spasm or some soreness in a knee that left him limping once in a while, everything appeared good, the comeback on course. Remarkably for a man coming from a three-year layoff, he seemed to be holding his own against men 10, 15 years younger, his fitness steadily improving.
Then, in an instant, he was hurt: two ribs broken by an elbow from Ron Artest during a summer game.
He needed at least four weeks to mend, four weeks during which he sat idle, four weeks in which nearly all the training he had done to that point went for naught—after which he maniacally rushed back into his workouts and scrimmages, trying to make up for time lost. Driving at such a furious pace presented its own danger, realized Grover, who warned Jordan that to play so hard after weeks of inactivity—and three years of indulgence before that—would leave him susceptible to tendinitis.
Jordan ignored him. They had become more than boss and employee to each other in the 12 years since Jordan had hired Grover, who was more responsible than any other person for having transformed Jordan from skinny wunderkind to strapping hulk. They were friends close enough to argue, and the trainer had felt emboldened over the years to chastise Jordan for choosing to skip a workout that Grover thought he had no good reason to miss. A 5′ 9″ former college basketball guard, Grover even sometimes dared to tell the boss how he should play defense against a rival star. “You don’t tell me how to play this game,” Jordan snapped once during his Bulls days, and Grover backed off. But Grover didn’t back down often, and he wouldn’t now. He found himself in the odd position of urging his friend, client and boss to slow down.
Jordan told him he didn’t want to hear it.
His workouts brought a measure of his strength and wind back, but his knees became steadily worse, as he pushed himself hard and then too hard. Jordan became plagued by a case of tendinitis. Grover was concerned that the comeback wouldn’t even make it out of Chicago, then became convinced that the calendar wouldn’t permit it. He told a couple of reporters that, due to the conditioning lost while Jordan’s ribs mended, he didn’t think it likely that Jordan would be able to play that season. Much of the media took Grover’s words to mean that the comeback now looked impossible, that perhaps Jordan himself had asked Grover to brace the basketball world for sour news.
It was the rare moment when Grover did not understand his boss. Jordan was not about to return now to that Washington office. It became common in the weeks and months ahead for sportswriters to echo Jordan’s line that he came back simply for “the love of the game.” He didn’t. He didn’t love the game so much that he hadn’t left it twice already. He didn’t love it so much that its pressure hadn’t made him consider getting out of the game a full year before his first retirement, back in 1992, when he told Grover to get a baseball training program ready. In the end, his father and Phil Jackson persuaded him to pursue a third consecutive championship, the first of his fabled three-peats, but the need for such coaxing underscored his need for a break from the pressures. He was not as immune from stresses as he liked having the world believe, citing his mental exhaustion on his way out the door following the 1998 season.
That retirement announcement had revealed only a piece of the truth. He privately knew he could not play the following season even if he wanted to; he had so badly cut his right index finger while trimming a cigar that he and Grover realized that the finger would be useless while it went through months of healing and rehab. Besides, with Jackson leaving and a new coach coming in, he didn’t want to be around. The game had used him up. Mental exhaustion described his condition precisely.
He had looked forward to an office and the executive life, with all its new stature and authority. He had chased it, only now to realize that it didn’t compare to what he once had. He felt empty without games, and so his comeback was never so much a tale of longing as it was of loss, which is a very different thing.
It was the difference in his case between wanting something badly and, on the other hand, going back to it because nothing else in his life looked half as good. It was the difference between having a compass and feeling adrift. “It’s hard for anything to be as good as playing for him,” a sympathetic Grover had said.
It was loss he felt—but loss was a dirty word in the Jordan camp; loss carried with it the image of a void, of something desperate. Jordan and his publicity minions instead talked about his love—“love of the game”—which sounded cheerier, as if he were responding to a calling instead of fleeing the void of an office. Love invested his return with the patina of a vocation and only the slightest hint of an addiction—what he winningly called an itch that needed to be scratched.
He had committed himself to playing now, regardless that he couldn’t see what was coming. From its first days, his comeback was like stepping outside at night and running in pitch-blackness, risky but absolutely thrilling, in the not-knowing, in the equal potential for magic and catastrophe.
Finally listening to Grover, Jordan relented and took it easy for a few days, the tendinitis in his knees easing a little. In late September, a simple press release announced that he would be returning as a player. On October 1, wearing a black and red sweat suit that had JORDAN stitched across the front, he appeared before the press in Washington, sounding nothing so much as mortal, by turns reflective, defensive, determined, amused, fiercely competitive and lastly uncertain, entertaining aloud the possibility of failure. “If I fall, I fall,” he said.
Then he headed for his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, the site of the Wizards’ training camp, where a game awaited him as soon as he wanted one. Grover had the only comment that really mattered: “Michael’s happy again. He’s where he wants to be.”